While working on a game in Unity 5 we encountered an issue that other people in the forums were having.
We reached out to Unity support and they directed us to create a thread to be answered by the community even though the existing threads and issues had gone a month without resolution.
We reached out after a few weeks without responses but we just get:
“we usually rely on the community users to answers technical questions”
now one of the issues has been marked as “resolved: by design” but no response as to what this means or any sort of work around.
Over a month after starting this process, and over 2 months for the other issues the only response I get from support is
“Hello
We rely on the community to answer. Someone will get to it in good time”
This is our first time turning to Unity support and the experience has been disheartening.
When working on a project with deadlines, how does this function as “support”?
Has anyone else faced with this kind of problem with Unity before?
I have a problem where all of my texture assets show black in the editor selection windows. I opened a support ticket and their “solution” was to reimport all my assets. Of course they just turn black again after a while, but I guess I’m just supposed to keep reimporting everything.
“By design” means that it intentionally works the way it does. It could be that what you’re doing is out of scope or counter to the system’s intended design. (From a glimpse, baking is intended for use on static assets, which I’d have thought rules out prefabs by nature. As an aside, I’d investigate baking in your modelling package depending on the intention of the bake.)
For what it’s worth, Unity does have a paid premium support service if that’s what you need. Depending on the nature of your project that may or may not be a worthwhile course of action.
I’m sorry to hear your disappointment. The bug in question was closed with this comment - I’m not exactly sure why it’s not showing up on the feedback site:
I’m also sorry to hear you didn’t have any luck, our support channel is typically for account, license & payment issues, due to the sheer number of our users, providing technical support to everyone is a little more complicated. Additionally, directing you to use the community site for technical issues is so that we can gather problems and solutions in the public to help others, however it’s unfortunate and annoying it didn’t work for you.
It looks like your post on the forums had gotten buried in newer posts, in future feel free to respond to your own thread to bump it back to the top of the list for better visibility. Did you contact support again after not getting any help through the community? They should be able to inform you of the notes that @Tautvydas-Zilys provided above, these are not visible to the public, not sure why that is but I will investigate as it would have helped you and others a lot faster.
I’ve noticed that sometimes “By Design” really means “By Design Flaw”. It really seems odd that they would intentionally break something that was working in 4.6.
Why we changed behaviour?
Renderer.lightmapIndex and Renderer.lightmapScaleOffset in unity 4.6 was stored on each renderer. This made it possible to store this data in prefabs.
In Unity 5 we have moved this data into the lightmap snapshot. The lightmap snapshot is an asset that can be stored next to the scene file. The reason we did this is because when we stored LightmapIndex, lightmapScale and lightmapOffset in the scene file, an automated process (clicking the bake button) resulted in lots of changes that are highly likely to cause merge conflicts in scene files.
By storing all the generated data of the bake process in a separate file, merge conflicts on the scene are avoided and it becomes possible to work in a team on the same scene. As a side-effect of not storing the data on the renderer, it no longer gets stored in prefabs either.
How you can handle lightmapped prefabs in 5.0
Overall we very much think this is the right tradeoff. For the cases where you do need it to store the data with prefabs.
You can make an editor script that when creating the prefab from the baked scene, you can just store an array of
struct LightmapInfo
{
Renderer target;
Vector4 offsetScale;
int lightmapIndex;
}
in a monobehaviour with references to the renderer. So that at load time you can then apply those to the actual renderer.
Because of time differences (we’re in Taiwan) I’m just getting most of these messages and I must say I really appreciate all the help. Aurore, I completely understand. I know Unity must be overwhelmed with the amount of questions that pop up so the community really is a great resource (just look at AngryPenguin’s history) however, even just being given the comment from Tautvydas would have been much clearer than receiving the same “someone will get to it” response for a month.
Joachim, thank you so much for your answer though, it’s enlightening to understand the changes that have been made that are resulting in the problem that we’ve been facing and to have a work-around.
We are still facing some issues after implementing the scripts where the lighting is coming out very bright in the camera preview (see photos), but having made some progress after all this time is a real boost of confidence to our dev team.
This is an awful thing to hear. By the time someone contacts unity support, they’ve probably already posted to the forums/questions/searched google. Basically you’re saying “If the community can’t help you, you’re on your own!”
It is indeed a pretty lame truth, but it’s a truth none the less. There’s just no practical way that they can have someone personally answer every question someone has.
I also am unsatisfied with Support. I have even contacted in the past with my area account manager for licensing questions and get redirected to support@unity3d.com. 4 of 5 emails sent were unanswered.
With time I have found out that Community support (and from asset developers themselves) is the way. Even Unity’s people dive in the forum like angels for random help.
As a Pro user, I’d like to have at least a quota of support requests (like 2 priority answers per month).
As @angrypenguin said, we do offer Premium Support services if you want a higher level of commitment, but it’s not free. (It need not be crazy expensive though - we do offer an Indie tier).
We simply don’t have the people to give a full answer to every support request we get, unless you give us the money to hire the people. It sucks but it’s a simple economic reality. Really, the best thing we can do is to ensure that everything we offer has sufficient ease-of-use and documentation that you don’t need our help…
Ask yourself how much the cost of maintaining the necessary workforce to handle those support requests would increase the cost of Unity Pro and then ask yourself how it would be any different from paying per request as @superpig suggested.
I wouldn’t mind to have that at lease as an option. Call it Premium Support Option. Soon I will release my product and I will like to have strong, priority support, to any of my issues, especially having into account that multiplatform products have a wider issue surface.
I understand not every bug can be fixed. Not even have a look at, due to the massive queue. But in this case I’d like to have the Premium Support option I referred before. I’m also an Apple Registered Developer and I have access to 2 support cases (which I took once and got some feedback/contact with a support engineer at least).
I also requested to support@unity3d.com some changes to my subscription plan and never got a reply. I’m about 3 months to release, so I’m not insisting since I don’t want any problem due to toggling the subscription from PRO to personal and back to PRO again in such timeframe, but I have paid since January unneccesarily (and I asked to switch to free plan). Anyway, as I say, don’t touch my license.
